Gus van Sant

Oscar-nominated writer and director Gus Van Sant was a key figure on the American independent film scene of the 1980s and 1990s, offering p tic yet clear-eyed excursions through America's seamy underb...
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Ben Stiller Turned Down 'Good Will Hunting' Job

By:
WENN.com
Mar 26, 2015

Ben Stiller turned down an offer to direct Good Will Hunting because it starred then-unknown actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
The Zoolander star made his directorial debut in 1994 with romantic comedy/drama Reality Bites, and soon became an in-demand filmmaker, but the one project that he dismissed went on to become one of the biggest hits of the 1990s.
When asked what he would change about his career, Stiller tells Vulture.com, "I remember my agent sent me the script for Good Will Hunting to direct, and I was like, 'Who are these guys, Affleck and Damon? And why are they attached to this project? No, thank you!' I mean, maybe I'd change that." Good Will Hunting received two Oscars for Best Supporting Actor Robin Williams and Best Original Screenplay for Damon and Affleck, and the man who eventually took the directing job, Gus Van Sant, earned a nomination for Best Director.

Rockers Iggy Pop, Michael Stipe and Matt Bellamy are among the stars who have designed custom Carparelli guitars for a charity benefiting children who live in war zones. The instruments will be auctioned off at Bonhams New York on 9 November (14) and proceeds will benefit War Child USA.
Former R.E.M. frontman Stipe tells RollingStone.com, "No person, and certainly no child, should have to endure what many of these children have lived through, and in some cases, still live in. I am honoured to be able to make a small contribution towards helping them. Thank you War Child for that opportunity."
Film director Gus Van Sant, former Cure guitarist Pearl Thompson and filmmaker Sam Taylor-Wood have also contributed their custom-created guitars to the cause.
Van Sant adds, "War Child's mission to bring war-affected communities the resources that their circumstances demand is not only crucial and appropriate, but speaks to a fundamental quality we have as humans to respond and react to injustice, even when we're not directly affected ourselves.
"I'm grateful to be able to take part in a response and to support War Child's programs that make a difference in the lives of over 375,000 war-effected children a year."

Miramax via Everett Collection
Between the two of us, my friend Jay and I had probably watched Good Will Hunting more than 50 times through. Like many, we had attached with sincerity to the story of a practically prepubescent Matt Damon, a genius of the Boston slums. As such, the familiar embrace of this particular movie seemed like a good choice when he showed up at my apartment — unanounced, as per usual — with the news that he and his girlfriend had just broken up.
As we sat in my living room on what I remember to be a bizarrely humid afternoon for upstate New York's autumn, trying our best to invest in the rise and fall of the prodigious Will Hunting, we both experienced something new. We weren't watching the very same movie that we had time and time over; we weren't adhered with irreverent empathy to the misunderstood bad boy that we both so vapidly wanted to be (and oh, that hair). Instead, our attentions turned with unprecedented domination to his screen partner: not the cackling Ben Affleck, but Robin Williams. As Sean Maguire, Williams always seemed more like a background player, a vehicle for Will's transport through his troubles. That is until this unusually muggy Sunday when Sean's charms and strengths seemed to rear themselves in a new way altogether.
We noticed, sharing our discovery tacitly, that in even the heaviest scenes, Williams was able to command a sharp, hearty laugh. Mere syllables uttered by the master of performance, portraying a man who embodied the idea of disgruntlement, sent Jay and I into delirious cackling fits. Williams was doing more with this role — the would-be square straight man part to the effortlessly cool Damon's young, debonair rebel — than we had ever understood. He was playing anger, judgment, and frustration in a very special way. A way that conveyed colossal pain and tremendous humor all at once.
After so many views of Good Will Hunting, we had discovered anew just how funny it was. And from this was born our mission: we decided to dub over it. A project pioneered in the interest of emancipating Jay from concentration on his heartbreak, we leapt into intense study of the film — of Damon's swagger, of Ben Affleck's buffoonery, and most of all, of one Robin Williams' freshly realized exhilirating display of dry humor.
Jay, whose timber was more conducive to the leading man position, played Will. I happily nabbed Affleck's Chuckie. We traded off the Stellan Skarsgaard and Cole Hauser roles, and left all of Casey Affleck's original dialogue in the finished product... for good measure. And I, the significantly faster speaker, was lucky enough to play the coveted role: Robin Williams.
To everyone else our project seemed like a bout of idiocy. Occasionally, we submitted to this designation. But we weren't in this to waste our junior year, or even (as so many seemed to think) to mock or parody a movie that we had seen one too many times. No, we were in it because we saw something in Williams and his role that spoke to us at that time. In the dark hours that met with Sean Maguire, he — or maybe Williams — made us laugh. Hardly at the expense of empathy or sincerity; in fact, Williams/Maguire's ability to incite a chuckle in the very interest of some of the most emotionally substantial scenes in Gus Van Sant's film is what stirred and provoked us so. That's exactly what Jay needed at this time — to find laughter when flat drama was more readily available.
And it's what I came to need, several months later — our project having fallen by the wayside, what with plenty of other understandable distractions getting in the way — when my own blossoming romance came to a crashing halt. "We've got to finish that movie," I decided then, thinking back on the carnal laughter incited by our scholarly expedition of Williams' every meticulous nuance.
We did. We stayed up 'til 3 throughout the week, watching, laughing, revising, remodeling... we'd turn away chances to go out with our friends — you know, like normal people — to stay in Jay's room and work on this masterpiece. We fell hard and fast in love with our take on Good Will Hunting. On Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's clunky but charming script, Gus Van Sant's occasionally schmaltzy direction. And Robin Williams' profoundly empathetic and hilarious performance.
By the time we were finished, our respective heartaches had won new perspective. Call it an effective distraction, or maybe it was just therapeutic. But I don't think quite anything would have worked so well to inspire the greatest creative exploit that the two of us would ever bring to life, nor would just anything help to foster us through lost love with such efficiency. There was just something about that messy, cathartic, ultimately special little movie, and the bearded man who stole the show.
It had to be Good Will Hunting. It had to be Robin Williams.
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Halle Berry and Naomi Watts have landed big movie deals during the first full day of the Cannes International Film Festival.
Berry has landed the lead in Luis Prieto's new thriller Kidnap, playing a vengeful mum on the hunt for her abducted son, while Watts is on the verge of signing up to play Matthew McConaughey's wife in Gus Van Sant's new drama Sea of Trees. McConaughey and Van Sant flew to France to promote the project on Thursday (15May14), when the director announced his plan to cast Watts.
Sea of Trees, which will be shot on location in Japan, is one of the biggest titles being offered to distribution companies at Cannes this year. In the film, Oscar winner McConaughey will play a suicidal American who travels to Japan to commit suicide only to find a friend who gives him the will to live. Raving about the story, McConaughey told reporters, "It's like (reading) a whole bunch of haikus back to back. I got the chills, which doesn't usually happen."

Courtney Love sold one of her late husband Kurt Cobain's albums for $135,000 (£84,000) just to spite a London auction house boss who estimated his whole collection would be worth $96,000 (GBP60,000). The Hole star insists she'll never sell off the Nirvana star's massive vinyl haul, but she was interested to find out how much it was worth.
She tells Pitchfork.com, "I put it in storage, because it's so precious... It's such a weird collection... This collection starts at age six and ends at age 27. It's like his soul in vinyl...
"Those records are somewhere in London. I felt like Kurt's vinyl was so valuable that I would either start giving them (records) away as gifts, or donate them to be sold for charity. The woman at Christie's said, 'Oh, it's worth £60,000 pounds', and just to prove her wrong, I sold one record for charity, for Mariska Hargitay's rape kit foundation, and it sold for $135,000.
"It was Talking Heads. I don't think that ruined the collection. I don't know what it was doing in the collection, but I do vaguely remember a Talking Heads argument (I had with Cobain).
"I also gave one record to (actor) Michael Pitt, who came over to my house to find me. I guess he had done a movie (Last Days) with Gus Van Sant, where he acts like he's Kurt or something. I've never seen it. There were four copies of the record, it was a seven inch on Kill Rock Stars (record label). It was one of (Kurt's ex-girlfriend) Tobi (Vail)'s bands... Go Team, but I didn't give him the one with Kurt's writing all over it."

James Franco is set to portray another gay character in a new movie by Milk director Gus Van Sant, according to a U.S. report. The actor will portray Michael Glatze, a prolific gay rights activist who denounced his homosexuality after turning to Christianity.
According to New York Post gossip column Page Six, Van Sant has hired Franco to star in the new movie, which is set to start shooting in the Big Apple in July (14).
Franco played gay rights advocate Scott Smith in Van Sant's Milk in 2008, while he also portrayed homosexual poet Allen Ginsberg in 2010's Howl and writer Hart Crane in The Broken Tower the following year (11).

Moviemakers Gus Van Sant, Lee Daniels and Wes Craven are set to direct a 10-part mini-series inspired by the Ten Commandments. The trio will team up with Jim Sheridan and Michael Cera to each direct one episode of the series.
Silver Linings Playbook's Bruce Cohen and Bob Weinstein are producing the project.
Weinstein says, "Each of these directors is acclaimed for their own unique brand of style and genre, so it's clear that we can expect 10 wildly different episodes from this series."
Cohen adds, "With each helmer choosing his or her own creative team, it will be exciting to see their visions come together."
Additional directors will be announced at a later date.

Michael Kovac/Getty
Former The Office star John Krasinski's latest screenplay, a collaboration with screenwriter Oren Uziel, will be produced by old pals Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Though their careers have diverged of late, with Affleck pursuing directorial efforts while Damon has remained an actor and activist, this marks the first film they've collaborated on since their late '90s heyday.
Krasinski, who wrote the Gus Van Sant directed Promised Land (a morality tale about the scruples of fracking) with Damon, wrote this new spec with Uziel. Uziel, who is credited as one of the writers on 2014's 22 Jump Street, is known primarily for his in-development genre-bending supernatural comedy The Kitchen Sink, which is filming now for a prospective 2015 release. Uziel is primarily a comedy writer, which would be a departure for Krasinski as a screenwriter, but could be a return to his sardonic character on The Office. There is a possibility that Krasinski will star, but so far no solid decision.
Krasinski and Damon have been friends since 2009, when they costarred in Promised Land together. Since then, Damon has worked with Krasinski's wife Emily Blunt in The Adjustment Bureau and thus his involvement makes perfect sense. Less so, for Affleck, though perhaps he's motivated by a potential to produce more of his own films after winning the Oscar for Best Picture early this year. No details have yet emerged about the project other than that it's an "action adventure," but it is expected to go into production in 2014.
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Milk director Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black are refusing to abandon plans to attend Russia's St. Petersburg’s Bok o Bok festival amid bomb threats linked to the event. The filmmakers are booked to host a question-and-answer session after a screening of the acclaimed 2009 film about gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk and they are refusing to let the drama surrounding the lesbian and gay culture celebration disrupt their plans.
The festival, which celebrates all things lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual, has been marred by false bomb alarms since it began last week (ends22Nov13).
Anti-gay protesters are particularly upset about the screening of provocative new lesbian love story Blue Is the Warmest Color, which was a controversial hit at the Cannes Film Festival in May (13).
The festival’s opening ceremony was delayed by 90 minutes following a series of bomb threats. They all proved to be false alarms.
The screening of Milk will close this year's festival on Saturday (30Nov13).
Bok o Bok is one of the first gay culture events to be held in Russia since politicians passed a controversial law against propaganda of homosexuality among minors earlier this year.
During the screening of Blue is the Warmest Color two under aged girls reportedly made their way into the theatre and watched 10 minutes of the movie.

Fine Line Features
It’s hard to believe, but this Halloween marked the 20th anniversary of River Phoenix’s death. The actor had yet to reach his peak when he died of a drug overdose outside The Viper Room in Hollywood at only twenty-three years old. Phoenix was often referred to as the new James Dean, and as hyperbolic as that may sound, it was actually very true – Phoenix displayed a truthful and raw intensity in all his roles that projected a maturity beyond his years, which is impressive considering that he had grown up having never seeing a film in his life. His short career inspired a legion of actors and his death allowed actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp to have the careers they had. The troubled actor was also heavily involved with environmental organizations: he had famously bought a section of the Amazon rainforest after receiving his first big check, just so that portion of the forest couldn’t be cut down. Sensitive and intelligent, Phoenix was more than just a pretty face – he was a one-of-a-kind performer that brought authenticity to every role he played. (But damn, that face sure was pretty.)
Explorers Ok, so Explorers isn’t exactly award-winning material, but it's Phoenix’s first feature film and is adorably weird. The film is a dorky sci-fi fantasy that has a chubby-faced Phoenix (who looks like the stereotypical image you get when you hear the words “President of the AV Club”) starring alongside a young Ethan Hawke (bonus point of greatness: Phoenix’s character is named Wolfgang). The boys somehow come up with a magic machine out of a Tilt-A-Whirl cart and cruise around different galaxies, so the film is obviously awesome. Though it didn’t fare well in box office sales, the film went on to acquire a cult following.
Stand By Me Truly one of the best coming-of-age films, Stand By Me was only Phoenix’s second feature film. The movie was well-acted by all the leads, but Phoenix showed a maturity beyond his fourteen years. Stand By Me was also when he began his trademark trend of being able to steal the entire movie he was in with just one scene. For the famous scene by the fire in which Phoenix’s character breaks down after sharing his disappointment of a teacher betraying him, director Rob Reiner reportedly told the actor to think of the saddest moment in his life – once the scene was over, Phoenix was still crying uncontrollably. The depth that Phoenix brought to the role was effortlessly translated on the screen and immediately turned him into a star, full on with both critical acclaim and Tiger Beat covers.
Running On Empty A storyline that had similarities with the actor’s own life, Running On Empty had Phoenix starring alongside Judd Hirsch, Christine Lahti, and Phoenix’s then-girlfriend, Martha Plimpton. The film finds Phoenix living as the son of two fugitives on the run from the FBI for an anti-war protest bombing of a napalm lab. The family had to constantly move around and change their identities, harking back to Phoenix’s own nomadic childhood during his family's days in the controversial Children of God cult. The scene of Phoenix’s confession about his identity to Plimpton’s character in the garden was hands-down the best scene in the film, and his performance ended up getting him an Oscar nomination at the ripe young age of seventeen.
Dogfight Dogfight is such an overlooked and underrated film, not only in Phoenix’s filmography, but just in general. The Nancy Savoka–directed flick is set in Vietnam War-era San Francisco and has a deceptively simple storyline: Phoenix plays an eighteen year-old Marine who takes Lili Taylor out on a date the night before he’s shipped off to Vietnam – what Taylor’s character doesn’t know is that Phoenix is taking her to a “dogfight,” a pretty evil game the other Marines play in which the soldiers compete for cash for who can bring the ugliest date. Taylor finds out and leaves, Phoenix follows, and voila – sappy rom-com, right? Except Dogfight somehow manages to be a wonderfully profound movie that avoids stereotypes and predictability, instead illuminating the nature of human relationships. Both Taylor and Phoenix’s performances are brilliant, and their adorably awkward bedroom scenes are so realistic, you’ll be cringing in your seat along with them. Plus, the film gives Musical Bingo some cred by making it spark some serious foreplay, so that’s totally awesome, too.
The Thing Called Love Though it’s definitely not the best film in his catalogue, The Thing Called Love is a great movie just for Phoenix’s crazy chemistry with Samantha Mathis, who he was wooing during filming (spoiler: he succeeded). It also has a charming Dylan McDermott and a young Sandra Bullock, just before she broke through with Speed. The film revolves around country music, but even if country isn’t your thing, the songs are still enjoyable and, making it even better, the actors actually sing their own songs. Phoenix initially wanted to be a musician and had a band called Aleka’s Attic alongside his sister Rain, so getting to see/hear Phoenix’s musical chops is a treat. The film is also Phoenix’s last completed film, and despite the fact that Phoenix was obviously strung out during filming, the charm and complexity he brought out in his character makes the film worth it.
My Own Private Idaho Considered to be Phoenix’s magnum opus, My Own Private Idaho has Gus Van Sant directing in all his weird, ethereal glory. The film is essentially an entanglement of two stories, one of Phoenix on a mission to find his long-lost mother, and the other revolving around Keanu Reeves in a loose adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry IV and Henry V. Phoenix plays a narcoleptic street hustler who’s in love with Reeves, his wealthy best friend who is really just playing gay-for-pay to rebel against his father. The film is notable for its Shakespearian dialogues and dreamy sequences symbolizing Phoenix’s character’s narcolepsy, but it’s Phoenix who makes the film the treasure that it is, serving as the heart and soul of the entire movie. The famous campfire scene where Phoenix professes his love to an uncomfortable Reeves was mostly rewritten by Phoenix himself, and the result is one of the most heartbreaking and well-acted scenes in film. My Own Private Idaho is when Phoenix allegedly began using drugs, and the character he played is eerily similar to perceptions of Phoenix – sadly conflicted, passionate and generous, jaded and tired, yet idealistic and innocent.
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Helmed an adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues"

Helmed mainstream drama "Good Will Hunting," co-written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck; received first Best Director Academy Award nomination

Helmed "Last Days," loosely based on the final hours of Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain

Moved back in with parents back in Darien, CT and worked for his father in a New Jersey warehouse

Summary

Oscar-nominated writer and director Gus Van Sant was a key figure on the American independent film scene of the 1980s and 1990s, offering p tic yet clear-eyed excursions through America's seamy underbelly in films like "Drugstore Cowboy" (1989) and "My Own Private Idaho" (1991). Openly gay, Van Sant dealt unflinchingly with marginalized subcultures. Even as he segued into the mainstream with "Good Will Hunting" (1997) and "Milk" (2008), he stayed true to his artful, gritty vision. Van Sant was the rare filmmaker who dipped in and out of the studio system with ease, and while his more experimental, limited release works were some of his strongest, he had a remarkable ability to stay true to his striking visual style and penchant for societal outcasts, while at the same time, crafting widely appealing films.

Name

Role

Comments

Gus van Sant

Father

Betty van Sant

Mother

Malinda van Sant

Sister

Education

Name

Rhode Island School of Design

Rhode Island School of Design

Catlin Gabel School

Notes

"He has used 'Hollywood' actors, but he keeps them shabby, quiet, and unglamorous and he helps them be better than any system has allowed: Matt Dillon in 'Drugstore Cowboy' and River Phoenix in '[My Own Private] Idaho'. Van Sant is gay, gritty and arty all at the same time. There is no trace of camp or swishiness: he is determined on heartfelt feelings and commonplace tragedy. He has a great eye, and an even better sense of adjacency, not quite cutting, but a feeling for cut-up simultaneity." – David Thomson on Van Sant, A Biographical Dictionary of Film

"I've tried to be as intimate with film as the written word is. There are all these little metaphors about how the clouds look like mushrooms. Or a writer can talk about the color of the sky for a paragraph. But how to do that in film was my big problem, how to take that imagery into a theater and have it be accessible, or at least watchable." – Van Sant quoted in The New York Times magazine, Sept. 15, 1991

In 1993, Van Sant formed a band in Portland, OR with Mike Parker and Scott Green, the two ex-hustlers who inspired the leads in "My Own Private Idaho."